The idea of RadicalInclusiveness is that we should try to be inclusive to everyone who shows up and wants to participate.

RadicalInclusiveness In MeatSpace

RadicalInclusiveness was practiced by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1960’s, and has had a strong influence on radical activist organisations involved in peace campaigning and enironmental-activism.

In the UnitedKingdom? the term SustainableCommunity? is widely used to refer to local communities that (among other things) strive to maximise the involvement of people. This does not necessarily mean that all people must be involved immediately in every group, but that all people must be given opportunities to get involved effectively in the wider community, both for fair treatment and to achieve social balance in the longer term.

Criticism

Barbara Epstein presented a notable critique of the RadicalInclusiveness adopted by CND in the book “Political Protest and Cultural Revolution”.

Online RadicalInclusiveness

If a semi-open community is the “canonical” place for any type of activity, it will be hard for it to embrace any policy other than RadicalInclusiveness. This is because people interested in that activity will experience a strong pull to become a part of that community, regardless of other factors.

If a canonical wiki decides not to be open, and separates itself from a significant population, it is likely to lose its status as “canonical.” It might end up as the canonical place to discuss XYZ from the ABC point of view.

If a canonical wiki truly wants to be the one place to discuss something, then it must practice RadicalInclusiveness.

Case: Wikipedia

LarrySanger? wrote on SlashDot?, talking about the rapid growth of Wikipedia in 2001:

This growth brought difficult challenges, challenges that perhaps I did not sufficiently anticipate and plan for. Some of our earliest contributors were academics and other highly-qualified people, and it seems to me that they were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project. I hope they will not mind that I mention their names, but the two that stick in my mind are J. Hoffman Kemp and Michael Tinkler, a couple of Ph.D. historians. They helped to set what I think was a good precedent for the project in that they wrote about their own areas of expertise, and they contributed under their own, real names. The latter has the salutary effect of making the contributor more serious and more apt to take responsibility for his or her contributions. They are also very nice people, but did not “suffer fools gladly,” as the phrase goes. Consequently, they wound up in some pretty silly disputes that would have driven less patient people away instantly. So there was a growing problem: persistent and difficult contributors tend to drive away many better, more valuable contributors; Kemp and Tinkler were only two examples. There were many more who quietly came and quietly left. Short of removing the problem contributors altogether--which we did only in the very worst cases--there was no easy solution, under the system as we had set it up. And I am sorry to have to admit that those aspects of the system that led to this problem were as much my responsibility as anyone else’s. Obviously, I would not design the system the same way if given the chance again. [1]

Later on he goes on to talk about a community needing a charter. See CorporateMembership for more.

Discussion

It may be that RadicalInclusiveness is a good strategy, when applied to the Internet as a whole. It is sort of related to the idea that, there should be a place for everything (TooFewWiki), or that there should be an OnTopic place for every conversation, etc… – LionKimbro

The Wikipedia example may not work for us though. They are building an Enclyclopedia. The focus is not so much on people and ideas, but on putting a product together for use. So it is a worker community. – MarkDilley